Monday, March 16, 2009

"In the present context we can see how much cinema has changed and shrunk: today it's misplaced to speak of a generation, a group, a school or even a pack. A young filmmaker now, from fear of being unnoticed, quickly becomes a fighting machine geared only to self-defence and self-celebration."

Daney wrote this in 1992. Has this changed today, especially with all the film writing happening on the Internet? Can a Nouvelle Vague-type moment happen again?

From 1985 to 1990, Daney hosted a weekly broadcast called Microfilms on French radio station France-Culture. He interviewed Rohmer in September 1986. The French recording is available from the French Audio Visual Archives.

After leaving Libération and "television criticism" in 1991, Serge Daney's ultimate "positive act" (in his words) was the creation of the film review Trafic, which continues to publish today. This is the translation (of extracts of?) the text Daney wrote in the first issue.

I remember reading it with all the excitement of discovering a major new film publication. The issue contains texts from Godard, Monteiro, Robert Kramer, and others. Now, I find the text a bit too symptomatic of Daney's last writings. There's a lot of melancholy. But he still manages to explore further one of the concepts he was keen on: resistance.